Woodward Mea Culpa, well sort of....

Bob Woodward: Yes, I Should Have Probed Iraqi WMD More Closely
Bob Woodward
By E&P Staff Published: June 18, 2007 3:35 PM ET

NEW YORK: The venue was a bit odd -- an online chat marking the 35th anniversary of the Watergate burglary -- but it produced one of the clearest admissions yet by Washington Post editor/reporter Bob Woodward that he was among the many who fumbled the ball on pre-war Iraqi WMDs.

He also took issue with how a key Fred Thompson angle relating to Watergate is portrayed.

Woodward has written three books relating to the war, each one more critical of the effort than the previous one, but in the online chat at www.washingtonpost.com this afternoon he was asked about the media's performance while the run-up to the war was still underway.

A reader from Rancho Mirage, Calif., asked: "In light of Watergate, why did the "investigative" branch of the press miss so badly on the Bush-Cheney spin machine to justify Iraq? Was the lesson of Watergate wasted, or was the press serving the country well?"

Woodward replied: "I think the press and I in particular should have been more aggressive in looking at the run-up to the Iraq war, and specifically the alleged intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction stockpiles. To answer the WMD question before the March 2003 invasion would have been a monumental task, but one that we should have undertaken more systematically."

Later, in response to a similar question, he added: "I think we've learned a lot from Watergate and from the handling of controversy and scandal in all the presidents' administrations since then. At the same time, as I said earlier, I wish everyone would be more aggressive -- the press and the Congress, and in developing a fuller system of accountability. Hopefully those in government also would see the value of transparency. Speaking openly and honestly gets issues out on the table, and as Nixon himself once said, 'it's the coverup that always matters.'"

Another reader asked about Fred Thompson, who was an attorney for the Watergate committee chaired by Sen. Sam Ervin and asked the crucial question about whether Nixon kept tape recordings.

Woodward replied: First of all, when Fred Thompson -- who was the Republican cousel to the Senate Watergate committee -- asked Alexander Butterfield the question about possible tape recordings in the White House or Oval Office, Thompson, like a good lawyer, knew the answer -- because three days before the public testimony, lawyers and investigators for the committee got Butterfield to reveal the existence of the secret tape-recording system.

Though Thompson seems to get public credit for asking this critical question, it was the work of others on the committee staff who dug out Butterfield's revelation in a lengthy interview on a hot Friday afternoon on July 13, 1973.

On another note, Woodward was asked if was really friends with Carl Bernstein (they have had their differences).

He replied: "I just talked to him an hour ago, and we talk all the time and see each other regularly. He was down here visiting my wife Elsa and I last week while on his book tour for his Hillary Clinton excellent biography 'A Woman in Charge.' Carl and I indeed are friends and will always be friends. We look at lots of things very differently, but over the decades have become much closer."

E&P Staff (letters@editorandpublisher.com)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free

Saddam Had WMD and The White House Refused to Act?

Don't know whether to believe this or not.

But if this guy is telling the truth, the Bush White House and various NeoCons, military leaders and spooks are worse than even we imagined. They left what might have been WMD where it was, so it could be looted?

I doubt that the bioweapon material was still all that lethal. But, according to this guy, there was evidence of chemical weapons (probbaly the ones we gave Saddam) and signs of radiation.

I wonder has anyone checked the radiation levels of the cities of Iraq in general. A whole lot of D.U has been spread around over there in the last decade and a half. Just wondering.

Anyway, we post, you decide if this makes any sense to you.

From what I think I know, this seems damned odd to me, even for the Addams Family in the White House and their cronies.


‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’
Melanie Phillips

It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.
Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

Between March and July 2003, he says, he was taken to four sites in southern Iraq — two within Nasariyah, one 20 miles south and one near Basra — which, he was told by numerous Iraqi sources, contained biological and chemical weapons, material for a nuclear programme and UN-proscribed missiles. He was, he says, in no doubt whatever that this was true.

This was, in the first place, because of the massive size of these sites and the extreme lengths to which the Iraqis had gone to conceal them. Three of them were bunkers buried 20 to 30 feet beneath the Euphrates. They had been constructed through building dams which were removed after the huge subterranean vaults had been excavated so that these were concealed beneath the river bed. The bunker walls were made of reinforced concrete five feet thick.

‘There was no doubt, with so much effort having gone into hiding these constructions, that something very important was buried there’, says Mr Gaubatz. By speaking to a wide range of Iraqis, some of whom risked their lives by talking to him and whose accounts were provided in ignorance of each other, he built up a picture of the nuclear, chemical and biological materials they said were buried underground.

‘They explained in detail why WMDs were in these areas and asked the US to remove them,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘Much of this material had been buried in the concrete bunkers and in the sewage pipe system. There were also missile imprints in the area and signs of chemical activity — gas masks, decontamination kits, atropine needles. The Iraqis and my team had no doubt at all that WMDs were hidden there.’

There was yet another significant piece of circumstantial corroboration. The medical records of Mr Gaubatz and his team showed that at these sites they had been exposed to high levels of radiation.

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(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free